So Sarah and I duly dived in and waxed lyrical. And by “lyrical,” I mean “Hot damn, why won’t these two women shut up?”
Oh, that is beautiful bit of condescension. Language even a busy blogger can understand. I beg your pardon, dear sir--I’m afraid your proliferation of syllables obfuscated the point for this busy blogger.
Oops, sorry, I didn’t mean “syllables.” I meant “bullshit.”
At any rate, did anybody else pick up on the fact that Schickel turned an observation about comments and on-line interactions into, well, Reviewing and Criticism? These are all related, but assuredly not at all the same thing.
Because I can certainly agree that raw opinion does not a review nor criticism make; on the other hand, I don’t think all those qualifications are necessary to write a perfectly serviceable review of a piece of art. He offers no compelling reasons why this might be so, either in this paragraph or in ANY part of the article. His standard cry is this:
Opinion — thumbs up, thumbs down — is the least important aspect of reviewing. Very often, in the best reviews, opinion is conveyed without a judgmental word being spoken, because the review’s highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.
I honestly fail to see why having comprehensive knowledge of the critical traditions, the artist’s entire oeuvre, the socio-political context or how low Hemingway’s left nut hung vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s is required in order to write a cogent, entertaining, mentally stimulating and perfectly valid review. Having more information and expertise can certainly help inform the review and enrich it, but none of it is strictly necessary. This man has it ass-backwards. The best reviews and critiques are grounded in an opinion--an informed opinion, though not necessarily an expert opinion--and it is this opinion that forms the thesis of the piece. It is, in fact, the whole purpose of a review (though not a critique, which is an animal of a different stripe).
Schickel also utterly ignores the primary reason why reviews exist in the first place: to inform people if something is worth their time and money. Stimulating discussion is all well and good, and I occasionally read reviews for that reason, but for us unwashed plebs, what we ultimately want to know is: is this thing worth my time, money and attention? The best reviews tells us not only what the reviewer liked or loathed, but why she felt that way, and perhaps most importantly, whether YOU’D feel similarly about it, too.
Look, I get it. Internet reviews have suffered from Klausnerization. We feel your pain, we really do. But tarring us all with the same brush and then insisting on impossible elitist standards for something like an everlovin’ review is not doing anybody any favors.
And now, for the Howling Irony parts of the discussion:
For example, French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a name not much bruited in the blogosphere, I’ll warrant.
I’m as fond of a pretentious and archaic turn of phrase as anybody else, but if this man sounded any more self-satisfied, he’d explode like an overfed tick.
In the middle of the 19th century, his reviews appeared every Monday for 28 years. He was a humane, tolerant and relentlessly curious man who once summarized his method in two words: “Just characterization.”
That “just” did not mean “merely.” It meant doing justice to the work at hand and to the culture in which it appeared.
Given how concerned this clownboat is with just characterization, he isn’t doing an especially good job with blogs and bloggers, is he?
Finally, there was George Orwell, scrambling to make a living by writing reviews for London’s intellectual press for maybe $20 or $30 a piece. He was more pointedly political than Wilson, and more attuned, perhaps, to the vagaries of trash culture, but his defense of honest vernacular prose in the face of bureaucratic (and totalitarian) obfuscation remains a critical beacon.
For somebody who seems to be praising the virtues of “honest vernacular prose” and appears to seek, as Twain advises us, to eschew obfuscation, he certainly avoids doing both in one relatively short opinion piece, doesn’t he?
I do think, however, that a simple “love” of reading (or movie-going or whatever) is an insufficient qualification for the job. That way often leads to cultishness (see the currently inflated reputations of Philip K. Dick or Cornell Woolrich, both easy reads for lazy, word-addicted minds).
And we have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering. We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance. We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion.
True, a love of the arts is insufficient for somebody to write a review; if nothing else, decent writing ability and critical thinking capabilities are also necessary. But one needs to prove one’s right to an opinion?
What?
Did this man not, just a couple of paragraphs above, applaud Orwell for his opposition to totalitarian influences on literature?
He’s also wrong about Dick. Dick may not have written the most elegant prose in the world, but his stories and ideas are consistently thought-provoking and have been tremendously influential, especially in SF. Being able to overlook the occasional bit of clumsy writing does not mean we’re word-addicted or lazy-minded. In fact, if I were a (heh heh) dick, I’d ask Schickel what his qualifications are for that particular opinion, how well-versed he is in the SF canon in general and Dick’s body of work in particular, and whether he understood Dick’s inspirations, especially as rooted in his socio-political milieu.
Frankly, for somebody so intent on the importance of qualifications in order to have a valid opinion, he does precious little to prove to us his qualifications himself.
The act of writing for print, with its implication of permanence, concentrates the mind most wonderfully. It imposes on writer and reader a sense of responsibility that mere yammering does not. It is the difference between cocktail-party chat and logically reasoned discourse that sits still on a page, inviting serious engagement.
Maybe most reviewing, whatever its venue, fails that ideal. But a purely “democratic literary landscape” is truly a wasteland, without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight.
This is probably where we disagree most radically. He sees the lack of structure and hierarchy as a threat, as a destructive force. I see what we have as a beautiful thing. Yes, there’s a lot of chaff and chaos because of the low barriers of entry, but that just means the potential for something truly wonderful emerging is that much higher. People suddenly have these handy, convenient venues to talk about books. They’re getting excited, engaging with other readers and exchanging *gasp* opinions. This is most assuredly a good thing. The tone may not always be to my liking, but that’s the beauty of having such a multiplicity of venues: I can hare off and look for one more to my tastes, or (and hold on to your panties, sports fans, because here comes the shocker) attempt to create a community of my own. The cure to bad speech--or at least, speech that you don’t like--is more speech, not less.
Sarah: It’s like a whole new realm of dissection and dissery in the Bitchery.
I hear him on the idea that real (and worthwhile) criticism isn’t merely an opinion. It’s certainly true that not all opinion pieces are legit. Take, for example, all the “This book was bad and I didn’t like it” opinions that pass for a review on Amazon. Not at all a review, and in addition the opinion is useless without some kind of exposition or at the very least description of what the writer found to be flawed. I can’t make a buying decision based on HootchieMommaR657 (and that’s her Real Name™!) pronouncement of mass suckage without backup as to why the suckage was so rampant.
But how and where on the bus stop of pretentious crap do you get off saying that, and thank you for using simple terms that I can understand:
Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.
Sounds like the ranting assertions of someone who is afraid he is not so special anymore, hm? You have to have qualifications to review? You have to be familiar with the details of an artists oeuvre? What Ever. I’m a bitch; that’s plenty of credential. I’m familiar enough with the format and variations of romance to know what does and does not reek; I should have to read every book by every author and study up with flashcards to erect a foundation of scholarly authority beneath my every word?
Limiting the collective of who CAN review is as bass-ackwards as the limit of who IS reviewed. To address the specific genre to which we Bitches devote our attention, let me ask a pertinent question: How many romance authors are on the NY Times Best Seller list currently? As of today, May 23, 2007, there’s two on the hardcover fiction best seller list, and four on the paperback bestseller list.
And how many of them are reviewed in the book section? That’d be zero, there, Dick. So already the door of your privilege is half-shut to nearly 50% of a top-10 list of bestsellers. Better get behind the door and shove it closed before any bloggers (GASP) come through and try to review some of those books.
But in the Unintentional Irony department, there’s much to celebrate. The purpose of the review, according to this exclusive definition, well, sir, you totally shoot yourself in the foot there:
[T]he review’s highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.
And you know where that dialogue takes place? Where the discussion happens? On blogs. In comments. In message boards and email threads and places where communities are constantly interacting. How is a discussion supposed to take place between a newspaper and a reader? You talk to yourself on a park bench reading the paper, and people don’t assume you’re erudite and educated. They assume you’re off your meds.
Of course, this could all be further support to the elitism effort in place already: only fellow readers of the New York Times or the LA Times or the Pretentious Buttnoid Times who’ve read the review in full can participate in the discussion, because it’s the elite review and it’s location that become part of the dialogue in addition to the book itself.
What really sets me off in response to this diatribe against the unwashed misspelled masses yearning to state their own opinions is that this guy and his ilk wouldn’t set foot near a romance if you paid him. Granted, the author is a film critic (and you must make “Film” a two-syllable word of course), but it’s not like he or any other reviewer in a major newspaper would “initiate dialogue” about a Roberts or a Gaffney novel, or “begin a discussion that...will persist” about the relative merits of Crusie or Kinsale’s works. So what’s with all the elitism that attempts to classify who is and is not a reviewer? We need MORE elitism? I mean, last I checked, sites like ours existed because there wasn’t enough legitimate critical review of romance anywhere, much less in major newspapers.
Maybe most reviewing, whatever its venue, fails that ideal. But a purely “democratic literary landscape” is truly a wasteland, without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight.
Yes, the Bitches once again have gone too far, we’re bottom feeding trashy bitches with no brains… in a wasteland. At least our wasteland has Fabio.
